Twitter users only send 58% of their overall Tweets using the company’s own proprietary Twitter applications and website according to a recent survey. The study comes just one week after platform chief Ryan Sarver’s said that 90% of all Twitter users are sending Tweets from official Twitter applications.

Sarver’s assertion may in fact be true, as much of Twitter’s activity is performed by a handful of heavy users, meaning 42% of all Tweets could in fact be coming from a much smaller group than the 90% of users who actively use Twitter apps.

Sysomos, the company behind the study found that of the 25 million tweets they sampled since the March 11 Twitter API was released, 42% came from non-official apps.

The company also broke down the percentage of major third-party apps with TweetDeck accounting for 5.5% of all sampled tweets with the following apps accounting for 13.1% of overall tweets: UberSocial, Echfone and UberMedia (the chart below shows use among third party apps, not among all Tweets across the network). read more

It seems that not a week goes by without something interesting happening within Steve Jobs playground (i.e. the iTunes App store). The same could be said for the numerous twitter apps, especially now with Tweetdeck hitting the scene (which TechCrunch has a glorious review of).

One of the most powerful and useful social media business tools I’ve found for using Twitter is TweetLater. With recent feature improvements, it is turning out to be a social media third-party application I return to more and more.

TweetLater was developed by Dewald Pretorius and served as one of the first Twitter applications to permit future scheduling of tweets to Twitter. Tweet now, publish later, thus TweetLater was named.

Called a “productivity tool for busy tweeple,” TweetLater manages all your Twitter accounts from a central console to publish tweets on a schedule or in a timely manner. I use it to publish my daily WordPress Tips and WordPress Plugins on my @lorelleonwp Twitter account, creating tweets months in advance at one time, saving time and energy while adding value for my Twitter followers. read more